February NPD 2021: Switch~614k, PS5 ~300K, XBS <175k

[Bofferbrauer2]

Shadow1980 said:

PDiddy said:

Common sense? I doubt there is around 5 to 6 million Switches in a warehouse or in transit somewhere, and its fair to say that it's a bit harder to track Latin America and SEA excluding Japan than the major regions. The other weird error is that Nintendo seems to not include MyNintendo shipments in their total sell-through numbers for Japan, which we can prove out with the known lack of inventory during 2020, especially in April. It's fair to say that at least 500k of those shipments aren't included in their cumulative sell-through figures.

Is it really that hard to believe? Shipped has never equaled sold. As of the end of 2020, the lifetime sell-through in Japan was sitting at about 17.65M, compared to 18.88M shipped. In the Americas, assuming again the U.S. is 90% of the regional market the LTD for the region is about 29M or so, compared to 31.17 shipped. So, between NA & Japan alone, we're already looking at well over 3 million units that have been shipped but not yet sold.

Looking at other systems, we see pretty much the same thing. For example, the PS4's LTD at the end of its fourth year was 73.6M units sold against 76.5M shipped, leaving 2.9M units unsold.

At this point in a system's life, several million units sitting out there in the wild is not unusual. Nintendo's "over 74 million" figure is not improbable.

Well yes, the PS4 had almost 3M consoles on transit and shelves at the end of 2017, and sold 20M that year. But the PS4 didn't run into any major shortages that year while the Switch did, meaning that there can't be too many on shelves already. And while we got a Mario title in January, it still didn't need to have that much more in transit to cover those extra sales. So I really doubt that there would be more than 4.5M in transit, warehouses and on shelves

curl-6 said:

I don't think anyone denies that covid gave video gaming sales a boost.

It's more the extent of the role it played that's in dispute. For example, while I absolutely think it contributed to the strong year Nintendo had in 2020, I think it was one factor of many rather than being the sole or majority driver.

↑↑↑This!